KitchenCI — JetBrains Plugin for Test Kitchen

Status: MVP — the current release covers YAML editing and static analysis. CLI integration, Tool Window, lifecycle actions and Run Configurations are planned. See Roadmap.

IDE support for Test Kitchen (KitchenCI) in IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, RubyMine, WebStorm, GoLand and other JetBrains IDEs.

The plugin is provisioner-agnostic — it works regardless of which driver, provisioner, verifier or transport you use.

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Supported IDEs

IntelliJ IDEA · PyCharm · RubyMine · WebStorm · GoLand

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Features

Configuration file recognition

The plugin automatically detects Test Kitchen in your project by looking for:

.kitchen.yml
kitchen.yml
.kitchen.local.yml

It also respects KITCHEN_YAML and KITCHEN_GLOBAL_YAML environment variables.

Kitchen files get a dedicated icon in the Project View. Projects with multiple independent Kitchen roots (e.g. component-a/.kitchen.yml and component-b/.kitchen.yml) are fully supported.

YAML editor

• Completion for top-level keys (driver, provisioner, verifier, transport, platforms, suites, lifecycle) and their common fields
• Quick Documentation (Ctrl+Q) with a description for every Kitchen key
• ERB support — <%= ENV['...'] %> expressions are not flagged as errors

Inspections

What is checked	Severity
platforms or suites is not a list	Error
Platform or suite is missing name	Error
Wrong value type	Error
Unknown top-level key	Warning
Duplicate platform or suite name	Warning
Invalid lifecycle structure	Warning
Unrecognised external plugin	Weak Warning

Unknown plugins always produce at most a Weak Warning — the Kitchen ecosystem allows third-party plugins, and an unrecognised name is not treated as an error.

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Extension plugins

The core plugin provides a public Extension API. Third-party JetBrains plugins can contribute additional schema, validation rules, completion variants and documentation for specific Kitchen drivers, provisioners, verifiers and transports — without modifying the core plugin.

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Roadmap

CLI integration (next)

• Kitchen executable configuration (bundle exec kitchen, chef exec kitchen, custom path)
• kitchen version — installation check
• kitchen list — instance state
• create · converge · setup · verify · destroy · test · login · diagnose
• JetBrains Run Configuration
• Tool Window with instance list
• Console integration (stdout, stderr, ANSI, exit code)

v1.x

• Kitchen Matrix View — suite × platform table with live state
• Lifecycle hooks — validation and navigation to hook scripts (pre_create, post_converge, …)
• Effective Configuration viewer — Source ↔ Effective toggle via kitchen diagnose
• Plugin discovery — detect installed Kitchen gems
• Advanced navigation — Instance → Suite, Instance → Platform
• Find Usages for platform and suite names
• Intentions — Add platform, Add suite, Create Run Configuration, …
• Structured test results → JetBrains Test Tree (via extension plugins)
• Artifact and Coverage API

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Security

• If your kitchen.yml contains credentials directly (passwords, tokens, private keys), the plugin highlights them and suggests using environment variables or IDE secret storage instead. It will never modify the file automatically.
• Secrets are never written to IDE logs or diagnostic output.

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Feedback and issues

Please report bugs and feature requests in the issue tracker.